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Introduction
The Meetings, Incentives, Conventions, and Exhibitions (MICE) industry has become a significant component of the modern service sector in China (Daniela et al., 2011). The MICE industry has gradually established a place for itself in most Chinese cities. As the China Tourism Industry’s Thirteenth Five-Year Development Plan emphasizes, one of the tourism industry’s priorities is to vigorously develop the MICE industry, i.e. the MICE industry in China is beginning to boom.
However, despite rapid growth of the industry and policies that support it, there is a heavy outflow of market participants. Currently, the lack of human resource in the MICE industry is a hot topic. Most experts believe it is not the lack of people but rather the insufficiency of professional talents that weighs in the MICE industry. Take the survey of certain colleges whose MICE sub-discipline ranks the first[1] in China as an example, on average just 3.6 per cent of fresh graduates choose to take a job in MICE-related fields every year. In other words, the enthusiasm of elites in the MICE industry seems not to keep pace with the booming MICE economy in China.
Opinions vary regarding the reason why there is such a heavy outflow of the human resources in the MICE industry. Some researchers believe that college education is to blame because there is a mismatch between theoretical learning and hand-on experience (Barron and Ali-Knight, 2017). Others, however, ascribe the problem to the students themselves, claiming that they have unrealistically high expectations while lacking the perseverance to begin a career at the bottom.
In fact, it is the vague understanding of the MICE industry that leads to hesitation in – or even rejection of the idea of – starting a career in the MICE industry (Nachmias and Walmsley, 2015). Even though the MICE industry offers a promising future, the lack of knowledge about the MICE industry career path blocks some people who would otherwise try working in this sector (Ladkin and Weber, 2010). Actually, evidence shows that recruiters always believed that their companies could provide more than what graduates anticipated or preferred (Brown et al., 2014). One of the reasons for graduates’ unwillingness to work in the MICE industry, despite the general difficulty in finding employment, is...